‫ McAfee Threats Report: Third Quarter 2013-2st Section

The McAfee Labs has studied the security threats of the third quarter of 2013 in a report. The following report is briefing that report.

Messaging Threats

After a slight decline in May and June the volume of worldwide spam has more than doubled this quarter. Spam volume hasn’t been this high since August 2010.

Botnet breakdowns

Infections from messaging botnets have showed an overall decline since May 2012. Quarter after quarter, however, we saw some ups and downs with a small general upward trend.

Cutwail remains in first place among botnets, while Kelihos, which was first seen at the end of 2012, is again number two. Slenfbot, which started in the first quarter of 2013, continues in third place.

Web Threats

Websites can gain bad or malicious reputations for a variety of reasons. Reputations are determined at specific domains, subdomains, IP addresses, and specific URLs, as well as by many other network and file attributes, to help users understand the risk level of particular web objects. Malicious reputations are influenced by the hosting of malware, potentially unwanted programs, registrations, hosting patterns, and other aspects. Often we observe combinations of questionable code and functionality. These are just a few of the factors that contribute to our rating of a site’s reputation.

By September’s end, the total number of suspect URLs tallied by McAfee Labs surpassed 85 million, which represents a 14 percent increase over the previous quarter. These URLs refer to 30 million domain names, up 3 percent from the previous period.

This quarter, we recorded an average of 3.5 million new suspect URLs per month related to about 330,000 domains.

Most of these suspicious URLs (94 percent) host malware, code, or exploits that have been designed specifically to compromise computers. Phishing and spam email represent 3.5 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively.